InfiniBand Interconnect Technology Used in 45 Percent of TOP500 Supercomputers

November 20, 2014

NEW ORLEANS, La., Nov. 20 — The InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA), a global organization dedicated to maintaining and furthering the InfiniBand specification, today announced that InfiniBand is the interconnect of choice for 225 of the world’s most powerful computers listed on the TOP500 list (http://www.top500.org). This represents an increase of 8.7 percent from the list published in November 2013.

Fourteen Data Rate (FDR 56Gb/s), the fastest growing generation of InfiniBand technology, grew 76 percent year-over-year from 80 systems in November, 2013 to 141 in November 2014. InfiniBand remains the only Petascale performance proven standards-based interconnect, connecting 24 systems. It also remains the most efficient interconnect technology, connecting 24 of the 25 most efficient systems and enabling efficiencies up to 99.8%.

Due to its low latency, InfiniBand has the ability to carry multiple traffic types (clustering, communications, storage, management) over a single connection. Utilized in thousands of data centers, high-performance compute clusters and embedded environments that scale from two nodes up to clusters with thousands of nodes, InfiniBand is a reliable, field-proven technology.

“InfiniBand continues to lead the market in both efficiency and performance,” said Bill Lee, chair of the IBTA Marketing Working Group (MWG). “The growing usage of InfiniBand on the TOP500 is evidence that IT managers recognize the value that InfiniBand brings to data centers and supercomputers.”

The TOP500 list is published twice per year and ranks the top supercomputers worldwide, providing valuable statistics for tracking trends in performance and architecture.

About the InfiniBand Trade Association

The InfiniBand Trade Association was founded in 1999 and is chartered with maintaining and furthering the InfiniBand specification. The IBTA is led by a distinguished steering committee that includes HP, IBM, Intel, Mellanox Technologies, Oracle, QLogic and System Fabric Works. Other members of the IBTA represent leading enterprise IT vendors who are actively contributing to the advancement of the InfiniBand specification. The IBTA markets and promotes InfiniBand from an industry perspective through online, marketing and public relations engagements, and unites the industry through IBTA-sponsored technical events and resources. For more information on the IBTA, visit http://www.infinibandta.org.

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